In article ,
George Dishman wrote:

"Jeff Root" wrote in message m...
"cgbusch" replied to Jeff Root:

It varies up to 17.01 seconds, so the Earth has more time to
rotate. Effectively, the EoT takes variable solar days and makes
them uniform 24 hour days. Let's say on 1 "end" of Earth's orbit
the light got to Earth in 1/100 of a second and at the other "end",
it took 8,640,000 seconds.

Unless I just don't understand what you are saying, this
doesn't make much sense. I wonder if you misunderstood my
hypothetical scenarios? Given that the speed of light is
constant (in vacuum), you are apparently describing an
extremely elliptical orbit.

It is just the difference between the time of flight at
perihelion and aphelion, 490s compared to 508s but that
is so small the orbit is close to circular.

THe difference in light time doesn't matter to the apparent
position! Why? Well, suppose the distance doubles -- then
the light time delay doubles too, and the object is able to
move twice as far during the light time delay. But since
the distance has doubled, this corresponds to the same
change in _apparent_ distance during the light time delay.
Therefore the light time delay doesn't matter.

What matters is the velocity of the moving object, relative
to the observer: the faster the object moves, the greater
the apparent change in position during the light time delay,
and this apparent change in position will be v/c radians,
where v is the speed of the object relative to the observer,
and c is the speed of light.

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